Monday, November 28, 2011

Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse
by Peter D. Schiff and John Downes

A fully updated follow-up to Peter Schiff's bestselling financial survival guide-Crash Proof, which described the economy as a house of cards on the verge of collapse, with over 80 pages of new material

The economic and monetary disaster which seasoned prognosticator Peter Schiff predicted is no longer hypothetical-it is here today. And nobody understands what to do in this situation better than the man who saw it coming. For more than a decade, Schiff has not only observed the economy, but also helped his clients restructure their portfolios to reflect his outlook. What he sees today is a nation facing an economic storm brought on by growing federal, personal, and corporate debt; too little savings; and a declining dollar. Crash Proof 2.0 picks up right where the first edition-a bestselling book that predicted the current market mayhem-left off. This timely guide takes into account the dramatic economic shifts that are reshaping the world and provides you with the insights and information to navigate the dangerous terrain. Throughout the book, Schiff explains the factors that will affect your future financial stability and offers a specific three step plan to battle the current economic downturn.

Discusses the measures you can take to protect yourself-as well as profit-during these difficult times

Offers an insightful examination of the structural weaknesses underlying the economic meltdown

Outlines a plan that will allow you to preserve wealth and protect the purchasing power of your savings

Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, Crash Proof 2.0 will help you survive and thrive during the coming years of economic uncertainty.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Richard Price (1723–1791) was a Unitarian minister in London and a writer on moral philosophy, population, and the national debt, among other topics. The British statesman and political theorist Edmund Burke singled out Price's Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), delivered a scant two and a half months after the Fall of the Bastille, for attack in his antirevolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which inaugurated a protracted and violent debate in England between those who favored and those who opposed the French Revolution. The full title of Price's address is A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. The "Revolution" being commemorated — the subject of the first two-thirds of the extracts given here — is the "bloodless" Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ended the short reign of James II. In the final third, beginning "What an eventful period is this!" Price greets with religious fervor "two other Revolutions" — that is, the American and the French revolutions.

Richard Price was a British moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English Dissenters, and a political pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the Constitution of the United States. He spent most of his adult life as minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church, where possibly the congregant he most influenced was early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who extended his ideas on the egalitarianism inherent in the spirit of the French Revolution to encompass women's rights as well. In addition to his work as a moral and political philosopher, he also wrote on issues of statistics and finance, and was inducted into the Royal Society for these contributions.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

The Making of the English Working Class is an influential and pivotal work of English social history, written by E. P. Thompson, a notable 'New Left' historian; it was published in 1963 (revised 1968) by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and later republished at Pelican, becoming an early Open University Set Book. It concentrates on English artisan and working class society "in its formative years 1780 to 1832."

Its tone is captured by the oft-quoted line from the preface:
"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity." (Thompson, 1980: 12)

Thompson attempts to add a humanist element to social history, being critical of those who turn the people of the working class into an inhuman statistical bloc. These people were not just the victims of history: Thompson displays them as being in control of their own making. He also discusses the popular movements that are oft forgotten in history, such as obscure Jacobin societies like the London Corresponding Society. Thompson makes great effort to recreate the life-experience of the working class(es), which is what often marks it out as such an extremely influential work.

Thompson uses the term "working class" rather than "classes" throughout, to emphasize the growth of a working-class consciousness. He claims in the Preface that "in the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs."

Thompson's re-evaluation of the Luddite movement, and his (unsympathetic) treatment of the influence of the early Methodist movement on working class aspirations are also particularly memorable. (Thompson's parents were Methodist missionaries.)
Thompson's theories on working-class consciousness are at the core of this writing, and their agency was manifested by way of the core English working-class values of solidarity, collectivism, mutuality, political radicalism and Methodism. Thompson wished to disassociate Marxism from Stalinism and his injection of humanistic principles in this book was his way of steering the Left toward democratic socialism as opposed to totalitarianism.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

In the wake of 11 September 2001, there has been much talk about the inevitable clash between "East" and "West." This book presents an alternative approach to understanding the genealogy of contemporary events. By taking students and the general reader on a guided tour of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history, this book examines how the very forces associated with global "modernity" have shaped social, economic, cultural, and political life in the region. Beginning with the first glimmerings of the current international state and economic systems in the sixteenth century, The Modern Middle East: A History explores the impact of imperial and imperialist legacies, the great nineteenth-century transformation, cultural continuities and upheavals, international diplomacy, economic booms and busts, the emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the current challenges to those regimes on everyday life in an area of vital concern to us all.

Engagingly written, drawing from the author's own research and other studies, and stocked with maps and photographs, original documents and an abundance of supplementary materials, The Modern Middle East: A History will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights into the events that have shaped history and the debates about them that have absorbed historians.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East
Edited by Edmund Burke, III

Until the 1993 first edition of this book, one thing had been missing in Middle Eastern history—depiction of the lives of ordinary Middle Eastern men and women, peasants, villagers, pastoralists, and urbanites. Now updated and revised, the second edition has added six new portraits of individuals set in the contemporary period. It features twenty-four brief biographies drawn from throughout the Middle East—from Morocco to Afghanistan—in which the reader is provided with vantage points from which to understand modern Middle Eastern history "from the bottom up." Spanning the past 160-plus years and reflecting important transformations, these stories challenge elite-centered accounts of what has occurred in the Middle East and illuminate the previously hidden corners of a largely unrecorded world.

The essays, divided chronologically, provide a comprehensive framework for those unfamiliar with Middle Eastern social history. "Pre-Colonial Lives" covers the period from 1850 until World War I, "Colonial Lives" chronicles the beginning of European rule, and "Contemporary Lives" relates the massive changes of the postwar era. Through them, we see how specific ecologies, ways of life, ethnic, class and gender situations can shape individual human action.